Statements of policy (was: Re: Issues lists and the "preprocessing" topic : requirement for policy)

John C Klensin klensin at jck.com
Wed Aug 20 23:00:25 CEST 2008



--On Wednesday, 20 August, 2008 12:37 -0400 Andrew Sullivan
<ajs at commandprompt.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 08:48:04PM -0400, John C Klensin wrote:
> 
>>    Mark writes about Section 4.4: "While exact policies are
>>    not specified as part of IDNA2008 and it is expected that
>>    different registries may specify different policies, there
>>    SHOULD be policies." This SHOULD is pointless, unless some
>>    constraints or guidance are given. Otherwise my policy
>>    could be "any valid IDNA label", which would be precisely
>>    the same as no policy at all.
> 
>>    Comment:
> 
>>    implementers evaluate per-zone policies and respond with
>>    decisions about what to display.  So, I don't think this is
>>    pointless.  The problem is whether different language would
>>    better describe the handoff.
> 
> I have a great deal of sympathy with the idea that we ought to
> say, "If you are implementing this, you ought to have a
> policy."  I also have a great deal of sympathy with the
> observation that, in the absence of guidance on how to express
> those policies and also in the absence of any automatic way to
> find out what the policies are, it's sort of difficult to see
> the point of the text.  I wonder whether it would be worth
> developing a way of expressing such policies.  
> 
> Such a development, I note, would go a long way to making
> plain the meaning of the charter item, "Separate requirements
> for valid IDNs at registration time (insertion of names into
> DNS zone files), vs. at resolution time (looking up those
> names)."
> 
> Is there any interest in such work?  (I fully expect someone
> to tell me it's out of scope given the charter.  I'm not
> actually asking the WG to adopt work that isn't expressed as
> an I-D yet, though, please note.)

I'm interested.  I don't think it is an appropriate WG work
item, at least until we get the current documents finished (your
comment about the charter item, with which I agree,
notwithstanding).  And I certainly don't have bandwidth until
then.  

     john



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